Thursday, January 28, 2016

With rapidly approaching retirement and other life altering events, Rabett Run has come perhaps to a fork in the roast. Eli has questions:

1. Should RR put up a donation box? After all income is required for trips to AGU, gifts for Ms. Rabett so she allows Eli to go to AGU and housing at AGU. The holes that the Rabett has been hutching up in San Francisco, are, to put it mildly, very 1950s motelish. Not quite rent by the hour but not . . .

2. Or should RR take advertising, which, since it requires that readers actually click on something is not a wealth generating activity either as Eli judges that his Rabett Run Readers are as cheap as he is. Sou appears to make a buck or two from this, but really, how low can Eli and Brian and John sink?

3. All in favor Eli's handing the keys over to Brian and slinking into the twittering sunset raise your paws. You will be ignored.

4. Anybunny interested in a book of RR's best takes showing how Eli was there before there was? Self publishing is a thing these days and one can pray for an Amazon review by George Taki

I would advocate self publishing a book. Mosher and my climategate book did very well. My more recent book published by Stairway Press isn't doing quite so well. There are reasons, of course--no climategate scandal to drive sales, no advertising to speak of, etc.

It won't support your retirement. But if you do it, put a link on your website, get Tobis and ATTP to put a GIF on their sites leading to Amazon, it might upgrade your hotel choices from the Lombard Street dives to something a little closer to the conference venue.

If you do self publish I highly recommend the Amazon vehicle Create Space. It fights a bit with charts and graphs, but is otherwise user friendly.

From what you describe I would not limit myself to one option. I would go all in and use advertising, a tip jar and a book or two. Why not?

Are you brandishing your cane at me again, Mr. Seitz? Given the reception it received from the Rabett's side of the fence, it was more of a humbling exercise than feeding our vanity. Fortunately there are at least two sides of the fence.

As you must have read it to have formed such an opinion, pray tell what was the part that fired your ire the most?

Eli: The book idea is a huge time waster. Fuller is right, you need a great public controversy coupled with direct access (like he had on WUWT) to a clamoring market ripe with conspiracy-loving morons who are hungry to lap up tripe and gossip. Then, once sales erode to a trickle, you can parlay that into a grant from the Koch-heads to fund your research to confirm their bias. Then, you can bite the hand that fed you seed money and turn on your fans to make a run to befriend those you slandered and create yourself a permanent research position at a privately funded think tank.

You are never going to make any money on your website, so lose that notion as well.

Use your chemistry skills in a hobby like beer wine or kombucha making and sell it at craft fairs and/or farmers markets. Become a tutor. Get a part time job at one of those science toy stores.

Many smartphone game apps now allow you to earn free coins, tokens, or similar game rewards by watching short promo videos or downloading other apps.

I've been waiting for something similar to show up on websites, but haven't seen it yet. There are multiple services competing - LNE free coins is just one -- picked at random, not an endorsement :)

This is relatively painless (cheap!!!) way to reward someone - just watch a 30 second video they have linked on their website. Of course this could be expanded to actually give away coins and a prize for the person that accrues the most coins each week/month/year.

Some people will sit in front of a computer and stuff the ballot box (political surveys, All-Star voting, etc). Making a game of it might actually earn some dinero.

"In The Lukewarmer's Way...justifies a middle ground in the ongoing debate between human-caused climate skeptics and Anthropogenic Global Warming activists. Presenting reasoned arguments and dispassionate data, Fuller suggests heated rhetoric be set aside so a rational way forward can be found."

Blurb on the front cover:

“The Climategate files opened up what was happening behind the scenes, and it turned out there was no paranoid fantasy: they really were out to get you.”

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.